


A Stranded Star

by Superfluous_Wit (Unbridled_Brunette)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:07:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24741301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unbridled_Brunette/pseuds/Superfluous_Wit
Summary: As Agent Pendrell recuperates from the injury that almost cost him his life, Scully finds a new way to accept her mortality. Alternate season 4.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully, Pendrell/Dana Scully
Comments: 26
Kudos: 62





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)  
> it's always ourselves we find in the sea
> 
> \--e.e. cummings

Scully stood in front of the apartment building almost twenty minutes before deciding to go inside. She wasn’t sure why she felt so indecisive. It wasn’t like her. But she’d been debating the visit for the better part of a week, pretty much ever since Pendrell’s doctors announced he should be well enough for discharge by then.

She’d driven past the place twice—a sort of practice run that she told herself wasn’t as crazy as it seemed by virtue of the fact it was on her way home. She never realized that before, that they were practically neighbors. He lived just a few blocks away, in a pretty brick front two doors down from a Shakespeare theatre. Scully had gotten his apartment number from Skinner, who didn’t seemed at all surprised when she asked for it.

“Are you planning to see him home?” was all he said. Some of the other agents apparently were. But Scully never considered joining him on his first evening home from the hospital. The gaggle of friends and family that surrounded him in ICU had made her uncomfortable, although she wasn’t sure just why. But she could only assume they would be eager to celebrate his homecoming, and she didn’t want to interfere with that. It felt too private, too exclusive. An event for the people who knew him best. Who was she to intrude?

She wondered, as she entered the lobby, if merely visiting him counted as an intrusion. After all, she didn’t know him that well; she certainly hadn’t been invited to his home before. Or now.

She only visited him in the hospital three times. She was ashamed of that, even now. Three times in three weeks was a pretty poor ratio by anyone’s standards, and he’d been ventilated and unconscious during the first two visits. The third time, she brought Mulder, which was arguably even worse given how he’d dominated the conversation. Not that he meant anything by it; she knew that. In fact, his boasting and teasing had gone a long way in making the usually taciturn Pendrell smile. But it was the principle of the matter. Mulder had kept the discussion moving—he’d kept it light—but he had also kept it focused squarely on himself. And Scully hadn’t wanted to talk about _him_ , damn it. She wanted to talk to Pendrell. She wanted to tell him—

Well—

What _would_ she have said to Pendrell if given the chance? Scully wasn’t sure she even knew, which might account for her current state of indecision. But she knew that she had to say something. She owed him that. You had to acknowledge when a man saved your life, even if he did so as a drunken accident.

As she stepped in the elevator, Scully couldn’t help wondering what had led Pendrell to the Headless Woman Pub in the first place. She had seen him there before, of course. Its proximity to FBI Headquarters made it a popular meeting spot for agents, so she had seen pretty much _everyone_ there at some point or another. But Pendrell had always been part of a group. It seemed out of place for him to be there alone, and so obviously drunk. Had he been waiting for her to show up that night? Had he been throwing back shots to bolster his courage before asking to buy her a drink? It felt almost narcissistic to believe that, but Scully couldn’t help but wonder. He flagged her down so quickly that night—almost the minute she walked in the door. Surely that meant he had been looking for her.

And if he _had_ been looking for her that made it doubly her fault, didn’t it? Because not only had she led the gunman to the pub in the first place, if it hadn’t been for her, Pendrell wouldn’t have been there at all.

She owed him something, then. Some type of apology.

The elevator doors creaked open and Scully exited into the fourth floor hallway. His apartment was all the way at the end. It wasn’t difficult to spot: a dry-erase board hung on the door with WELCOME HOME printed on it in brightly colored block letters. Scrawled around this message were the signatures of people who had stopped by. Some of the names Scully recognized; most she did not. It reminded her of the crowd of people standing around the ICU waiting room at the hospital, and she felt ashamed of herself all over again for being surprised that Pendrell had so many friends.

Careful not to disturb the Welcome Home sign, Scully rapped on the door. It opened at the second knock, which startled her so much it left her momentarily speechless. But it wasn’t Pendrell who greeted her. Instead, a woman stood there, blinking tiredly into the dim light of the hall. She was small and squat and she had eyes like Pendrell’s. Scully recognized her from the hospital. She was his older sister. He had a big family, she remembered, all with those eyes and varying degrees of red hair.

Scully forced herself to smile at the woman, who seemed to be looking at her a little warily.

“I hope it’s all right to show up without calling first,” she said politely. “I’m here to see Agent Pendrell.”

The woman’s expression soured. “He isn’t well enough to think about work yet,” she began. And immediately Scully realized her mistake.

“It isn’t about work,” she said quickly. “Although we do work together. But I’m here because—because—I wanted to see him. I wanted to tell him—”

The woman’s eyebrows lifted slightly as Scully faltered. Her look became appraising.

“You were there that night.” It wasn’t a question. “You’re the agent—the doctor—who helped him.”

“Until the paramedics arrived,” Scully agreed. “But I’m afraid that I’m also the reason he was shot. The intended target was a man in my custody, and I wanted to tell Agent Pendrell…Well, I wanted him to know how sorry I am that it happened.”

Pendrell’s sister didn’t look at all surprised to hear this, which led Scully to believe that he must have explained to her what happened that night. Yet, she didn’t look angry, either. If anything, Scully’s admission seemed to soften a little of the anxiety in her expression. She glanced over her shoulder into the apartment.

“Sean, there’s someone here to see you. Are you up to it?”

There was an indistinct answer to her call, which his sister appeared to catch even if Scully did not. She nodded at Scully and opened the door a little wider.

“Come in. He’s in the bedroom...at the back there.” She indicated the door with a jut of her chin.

Pendrell’s apartment was a little smaller than Scully’s own, and it was painfully neat. She looked around at the inexpensive furniture, the shelves lined with books. It amused her to see that he had a framed copy of a phrenology chart on one wall and a print of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on another. A Todd MacFarlane statue of Spiderman sat in the middle of his coffee table.

Smiling a little to herself, Scully started across the tiny living room, but Pendrell’s sister spoke up and stopped her before she reached the halfway mark.

“Will you be here long?” she asked.

Scully paused, trying to weigh the meaning behind the words. The phrasing sounded almost accusatory, but the woman’s eyes looked nothing but tired.

“I hadn’t thought.” It seemed like the safest reply.

The woman shifted. “It’s just that...I have to run to the drugstore. He needs a prescription. I thought...since you’re here…”

So that’s what it was: sisterly concern instead of suspicion. Well, Scully couldn’t blame her for that. The bullet that invaded Pendrell’s chest had collapsed his right lung, and his heart stopped twice during the thoracotomy performed to repair it. There was a time—days, even—when the doctors seemed certain he would die. The thought of leaving him alone must be horrifying to his family.

“I can stay with him until you get back,” she offered.

Pendrell’s sister smiled with obvious relief. “Well, if you’re sure,” she said, as she pulled on her jacket. “But don’t tell him I asked you to do it,” she added. “He’s the baby of the family, and we’ve been driving him a little crazy with our coddling.”

She went out, leaving Scully to cross the last few steps to the bedroom alone.

The door was partially ajar. Through it, she could see a sliver of his bed, as well as a glimpse of bare feet. Television jabber and canned music drifted from inside the room, but Scully barely noticed that. Her attention was caught, suddenly, by the sound of his breathing: a labored sort of rasping that told her he wasn’t as far into his recuperation as she might have hoped.

She tried to prepare herself for that before pushing the door wider and stepping into the room. She prepared herself for his sickroom pallor and the dark smudges that ringed his blue eyes.

But she had not prepared herself for how sunken those eyes would be, nor for his lost weight. When she saw him in ICU, tubes and wires had masked the thinness. It hadn’t been terribly noticeable. But this….

Scully stood in the doorway a moment, unsure of how to proceed. Because he didn’t even look like Pendrell. All the boyish roundness was gone from his face, and his frame looked lost in the loose t-shirt and pajama pants he wore.

He saw her, though, and a familiar smile lit up his face.

“Agent Scully!” His voice was a hoarse whisper—a result of the long stint with the bronchial tube—but she detected genuine pleasure in it.

She heard surprise, too, and that made her own throat ache with a renewed rush of guilt. Did he really believe she thought so little of him, she wondered. Had she really shown him so little regard in the past that he would be surprised to see her now?

“Is Mulder with you?” His gaze moved to the hallway behind her, but Scully knew only politeness made him ask. More than ever, she was glad she had not asked Mulder to come with her. She was gladder still that she hadn’t told Mulder that she was coming.

“No, it’s only me this time. And it’s Dana,” she reminded him. “We talked about that at the hospital...remember?”

“Oh.” His sheepish expression told her he didn’t, but Scully didn’t mind. Given the amount of opiates he was on at the time, it was a wonder he remembered seeing her at all.

“So, unless we’re at work, you’re welcome to call me Dana.” It came out awkwardly, like a badly read bit of script, but Pendrell didn’t seem to notice. He looked pleased.

“And I’m Sean?” He said it like a question, so she answered it as one.

“Unless you would rather remain Agent Pendrell.”

It was a joke, of course. She knew he wouldn’t want that. But Pendrell wasn’t familiar with her sense of humor the way Mulder was; he took the dryness of her tone at face value.

“I like Sean, myself,” she added, noticing his crestfallen expression. “It suits you.”

That smile again. As sweet as ever, although something about it made her suddenly want to cry. Because he looked so young lying there in his pajamas. Somehow, she hadn’t expected that. He was always so competent at his work she had forgotten how young he was. How—well, it seemed odd to call a grown man, an FBI special agent, _innocent_ , but there you were. She had no other word for it. What else would you call a man who smiled like that? Who blushed when he invited you to sit down on the edge of his neatly made bed?

He blushed deeper when she actually did it. As if, despite everything that had happened to him, he couldn’t quite help reverting to type.

Of course, neither could she. She hadn’t sat there ten seconds before she asked him if she could take a look at his stitches.

Pendrell seemed a little shocked by this, but he nodded a yes. And he leaned forward to make it easier for her to pull the tail of his t-shirt up to his shoulder.

“It looks really good,” she murmured. And in a way, it did. The thoracotomy incision was on his side just below the armpit, an angry-looking red divot zigzagged with black thread. It stood out rather appallingly against the backdrop of his otherwise smooth skin, but it was healing well. Scully forced herself to focus on the positive.

She moved her hands a little higher to his right pectoral. She wanted to examine him there, too. But it would mean unwinding his dressing and pulling the gauze not just from the bullet wound on his chest, but also the exit wound at his back, which would be, at the very least, uncomfortable for him. So she didn’t ask. But she probed gently, feeling for signs of heat or swelling in the area surrounding it.

“Are you having any pain?” she asked.

Pendrell shook his head and gulped. No pain at all.

An obvious lie, but not necessarily a deliberate one, Scully thought with amusement. Because whatever pain he might be feeling clearly came second to the novelty of her hands on his torso. Yet, it warmed her, a little, to see how much of a gentleman he remained in spite of it, and how valiantly he tried to hang on to his reserve. There were no innuendoes, no jokes, no attempts to take advantage of the situation—the last time she’d seen a man hold himself so still for an examination, it was a corpse.

_Pendrell has a crush on you._

Mulder often teased her about it, but Scully had never given the matter much consideration before now. Pendrell was just…well, _Pendrell._ The lab guy. She never thought of him as a man, not in that way. If she were being honest with herself, not in any way at all.

But now, as her fingertips trailed over the rise of a too-prominent ribcage, she found herself startled by the depth of her own concern for him.

“You’ve lost a lot of weight, Sean.”

He shrugged as if unconcerned. “Well, I had a little pneumonia.”

The way he said it made Scully want to laugh in spite of herself. As if anyone could have a “little” pneumonia. Still, the answer worried her. Hospital-acquired pneumonia could be a killer, particularly if his doctors made the mistake of discharging him too soon. She wished she knew what his chest x-rays looked like. She wished she had thought to bring her stethoscope.

She smoothed his shirt back down and looked at the jumble of medical supplies on his night table. Sure enough, a pulse oximeter lay amongst them.

Pendrell gave a crooked smile when he saw her reaching for it.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Really. I’m keeping an eye on it. I have a chart and everything.”

Nevertheless, he held out his finger so she could clip it on. She liked that about him. The easy, obliging way he had, which was so unlike anyone else in her life. Especially herself.

“Your oxygen saturation is a little low.”

He tilted his head and peered down at the monitor. “Ninety-three percent. It’s hanging in there.”

“That’s usual for you since you got home?”

He nodded, and Scully persisted. “Is your doctor aware of that?”

“She’s aware. She’s a good doctor,” he added. “I mean…government insurance, best in the world, am I right?”

He was smiling again, trying to draw a smile out of her. But Scully refused to be drawn.

“I need to tell you something, Sean. I came here to tell you something.”

He widened his eyes a little at her leaden tone. “You say it like that, and I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

“No, it isn’t anything terrible. I just…want to apologize to you.”

“For what?”

He seemed so genuinely puzzled it made her angry. Stop being so damn nice, she wanted to tell him. Stop letting people trample all over your good will before it gets you killed.

Except, of course, that niceness was the very thing she liked most about him. And Pendrell's current state of injury was _her_ fault, not his.

“Has Skinner talked to you about that night?”

He nodded. “A little. They took a statement at the hospital after I woke up.”

“Then you know that the man I was with that night was a federal witness awaiting transfer. He was in my custody and I…I made a mistake.”

Pendrell frowned. “What kind of mistake?” he asked.

“I brought him to a public place. I left him alone when I went to the bar. I let you get involved with it all. Actually, thinking about it, I made a lot of mistakes. And you got hurt as a result.”

“Oh, well…” He shrugged.

“You saved my life that night, Sean.”

At that, he finally met her gaze. But he didn’t seemed pleased. He was shaking his head.

“Don’t say that. I didn’t do anything. I was drunk—it was stupid—”

“It _was_ stupid. And a waste. It was…” She shook her head, overcome by the enormity of what it had been. “I just want you to know how sorry I am about it.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” he said. “I might be a lab rat, but I’m still an FBI agent. Getting shot isn’t outside the parameters of the job description. You know?”

Maybe not, but that didn’t do much to alleviate her guilt in the matter. It occurred to her to tell him that things hadn’t ended too well for Frish, either; but she didn’t want to burden him with that. Instead, she reached down and plucked the pulse oximeter from his finger.

“I hope you don’t mind me doing that,” she said, nodding to the instrument. “I guess I can’t help myself. Medicine…”

“I get it. My sister is a dental hygienist. She’s always asking to look at my teeth.”

Scully surprised herself by laughing.

“Is that your sister I just met?” she asked.

“No, that’s Finola; she’s an attorney. Cara is the one who works in teeth.”

“How many sisters do you have?”

“Four. And two brothers.” He smiled at the look on her face. “My mother is Irish, in case it wasn’t already obvious by the hair.”

“Your father isn’t?”

“He’s English. I mean, originally. He was born in Boston.”

“You’re from Boston?”

He shrugged. “I’m from everywhere. Army brat.”

That surprised her. He seemed too well adjusted to be an Army brat.

“I was a Navy brat.”

“I know. You told me before.” He saw her curious expression and added, “In the lab. We were waiting for reports to print…remember?”

She didn’t, and it amazed her that he did. Had she asked him about himself during the same conversation? If so, why didn’t she remember any of his answers?

“Your sister seems like a good nurse.” It was all she could think of to say.

“She’s great, isn’t she? They’ve all been taking turns with me since I got home. It’s Finola’s turn tonight. Everyone else is staying at a hotel. If I had the room, I guess they’d all be here.”

Scully thought so, too. Everything about him screamed big, happy, loving family. It scared her a little to realize how close she had come to shattering that for them. Sean, the baby of the group, dying in a puddle of beer after a gunfight.

“I should probably go.” She spoke without thinking, but she knew the impulse was right. She _should_ go now that she’d apologized. She should leave him to the safety of his family and his normal life. She had no right to poison him with her presence. Or, rather, with her proximity to the X-Files, which poisoned everything in their orbit.

Pendrell was staring at the television set as if he hadn’t heard, although she knew he had. She watched the knot of his Adam’s apple move up and down as he gathered his courage to say, “You shouldn’t have come just because you feel guilty.”

She felt her face heat at his words. “I didn’t.”

“You don’t have any reason to feel guilty. You’re not obligated to do anything.”

The earnestness in his tone unraveled her in the strangest way. If he’d sounded the least bit angry—or even hurt—she knew she could have left with her resolve intact. But he didn’t. If anything, he seemed determined—if a little unwilling—to absolve her of responsibility. She could walk out today and never look back, and she knew he wouldn’t think less of her for it.

Which was exactly why she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Her eyes traveled the line of his gaze to the television. Two men in white coats striding down the hall of what appeared to be a hospital.

“Is that Dick Van Dyke?”

She felt, rather than saw, Pendrell’s eyes turn toward her.

“ _Diagnosis Murder_ ,” he said. “You ever watch it?”

She shook her head.

“It’s pretty good. See, Dick Van Dyke is a doctor who solves crimes in his spare time. His son is a police detective.”

“Sounds interesting.” It didn’t, really, but that didn’t matter. It was something to talk about, something on which to focus her attention so she didn’t have to go.

When the show broke for commercial Pendrell nodded at the ad—Red Lobster—and asked her, “Have you eaten dinner?”

“Not yet.” She knew what he was gearing up to do. And while she wouldn’t exactly encourage him, she couldn’t bring herself to impede his efforts, either. She stared at the flicking television screen and waited.

And sure enough.

“There’s a really great Chinese place down the block if you like Sichuan.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And they deliver.”

Scully turned her head a little to hide her smile. “That must be convenient for you,” she said innocently. “Especially now.”

“I was thinking…if you’d like to stay…”

She liked the tone he used—low and just a little tentative, as if he were coaxing a cat out of hiding. If he’d been Mulder, he would have just ordered the food and expected her to enjoy it.

She looked over at him.

“Are you asking me to have dinner with you, Sean?”

His face reddened, although he met her eyes bravely when he said, “Well, I still owe you a birthday drink.”

“Yes.”

“Only I’m not allowed to drink with the medication I’m on. So I thought I’d treat you to a meal instead.”

She couldn’t look into those blue eyes anymore. They were too eager, too without guile. She shifted her gaze to his hands, now fiddling nervously with the remote. For a small man, he had surprisingly long fingers, like a piano player. His left hand had an ugly bruise on the dorsal side, as if the nurse had been too rough removing his IV catheter.

Scully reached out and touched the bruise lightly with her fingertips, surprising them both. She could feel Pendrell watching her, the question written all over his face. But she didn’t look up to see it. Not even as she said, “I would love to have dinner with you, Sean. Thank you for asking me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's more to this story if anyone cares to read it, but I figured I'd get a feel for demand before working on subsequent chapters. I never planned to write an X-Files fanfic. I haven't watched the series in years, and I'm supposed to be working on a novel. But I was down the Google rabbit hole one night, and I somehow stumbled across an interview with Brendan Beiser. He talked about how, even though he and Gillian are close in age, he felt much younger than her, because she was always such a professional on set. That got me thinking about how young the actors were at the time, and the ages of their respective characters. Then I started thinking about what would happen if the two of them had actually been allowed to interact outside of the office, and what kind of influence they might have had on each other's lives--especially considering that Scully was dealing with a terminal cancer diagnosis during this time. And then I thought...well, that rabbit hole just keeps on going, doesn't it? So here I am. Feel free to follow me down it, if you like.


	2. II

**II**

Pendrell was right. It _was_ good Sichuan.

It was good, too, to see him sitting at the kitchen table instead of lying in bed, although the journey there had been hard to watch. Pendrell—who darted like a dragonfly across the lab, who bounced on the balls of his feet as he stood at his workstation and gesticulated wildly to emphasize his point when he explained test results—reduced to gingerly creeping along with one hand pressed against his side. Seeing it hurt Scully in a way that she wasn’t able to define, even to herself.

And it concerned her. He looked so frail. He lost his breath so easily. The doctor in her wanted to haul him back to the hospital for bloodwork and a pulmonary function test.

His sister Finola seemed worried, too. Scully saw her watching him out of the corner of her eye as she bustled around the tiny kitchen area, preparing her own meal.

“Honestly, Sean. I don’t think that is what you need to be putting into your body right now. The amount of sodium alone...”

“Don’t forget the MSG. There’s an _incredible_ amount of MSG in this.” Pendrell threw Scully a smile as he spoke. He’d warned her, as he dialed in their food order, how much his sister wouldn’t like it. She would scold him when she got back from the pharmacy.

“She’s on a health kick,” was his explanation. “She thinks she can heal me through the power of macrobiotics.”

“And you disagree?”

“She wants me to eat things like boiled millet and Bancha twig tea. My organs would shut down out of spite.”

And Scully, who’d been known to eat boiled millet herself on occasion, if only to detox from all the fast food she subjected herself to when she and Mulder were on the road, laughed.

He was good at making her laugh, she realized. Why hadn’t she noticed before that he was funny?

And as she dug into a carton of spicy noodles, she had to admit that Pendrell was also right. Healthy or not, this was certainly tastier eating than the steamed brown rice and collard greens his sister insisted on cooking for herself.

Pendrell’s table was so small the three of them seemed in constant danger of whacking elbows or knocking over each other’s drinks, but Scully didn’t mind. She had wondered, when he asked her to stay, just what Pendrell planned to do with his sister during dinner. Now she knew the answer: nothing. His intent had never been to be alone with her, merely to keep her in his company.

Which was a relief, Scully told herself. It took the pressure off to define the meal as anything more than she wanted it to be.

Except, perversely, a part of her missed the tension from before. In the presence of his older sister, Pendrell was far less shy—and far less focused on Scully herself.

Still, Finola was a pleasant enough person. And Scully enjoyed listening to the way they bantered as they ate. It reminded her of her own siblings, and the closeness they had shared—until Missy’s death ruined everything.

Eventually, conversation turned to the rest of the family. The throng of redheads Scully remembered so clearly from the ICU waiting area, now apparently cloistered in a mid-grade D.C. hotel.

“How long will they be in town?” Even as she asked, Scully wondered if the question was too personal. It had been so long since she had a normal, non-work-related conversation, that she was beginning to forget what constituted small talk. But Pendrell only shrugged.

“They’ve been kind of alternating already over the past couple of weeks. You know, coming in town in shifts so they won’t have to miss too much work. Everyone except my parents, that is. They’ve been here the whole time. I can’t get rid of them.”

She smiled at the way he said it. Deep affection mixed with just a little genuine exasperation.

“I’m sure they’re just worried,” she told him.

“We’ve all been worried,” Finola agreed. “I think Mom wore a groove in her rosary beads over the last month. Sean always was her favorite.”

Scully smiled. “Well, I’m not surprised.” And she wasn’t. Pendrell was exactly the kind of son a mother would be apt to adore.

Pendrell ducked his head toward his plate, as if trying to hide his pleasure at the compliment. It was such an artless gesture, and so boyishly _Pendrell_ that Scully felt a rush of heat in her own face. And the same impulse that had driven her to touch his hand earlier now compelled her to turn slightly in her chair, so that her legs angled toward him instead of away. Her knees brushed against his underneath the table.

Immediately, he pulled back, shifting his chair a little in order to give her more room. Mistaking her intentions, she thought, and gentlemanly to the last. But she moved, too, following him so that their legs remained pressed, ever so slightly, against each other. Then he understood.

He smiled and looked up—

—And Scully felt the drip of blood at the same second she saw the expression of horror cross his face.

“God. I’m sorry.”

She grabbed her napkin and pressed it to her nose. The warmth in her cheeks wasn’t from the pleasure of flirtation now. She felt embarrassed, disgusted with herself, and oddly ashamed. Maybe it was the look in his blue eyes. The sense that she had managed to hurt him again.

“Are you all right?” Pendrell moved as if to stand, but Scully shook her head and waved him back.

“I’m fine. I just—it happens sometimes. Could I—?”

She didn’t finish, but it didn’t matter. He understood.

“The bathroom is right there." He motioned to a door off the living room. "There are towels in the cabinet by the shower if you need—”

“Thanks.” She pushed her chair back from the table and fled.

***

In the bathroom, Scully couldn’t bear to spoil his spotless white towels. She grabbed a wad of Kleenex instead, leaning over the counter until the flow of blood finally stopped. She rinsed the red spatters from the sink first, and then cleaned off her nose and chin.

Her face in the mirror looked white and haggard, as she daubed at it with a moistened tissue. Her chin was quivering.

 _Stop being so stupid,_ she told herself sternly. _Stop being so weak._

She thought of Pendrell, so hurt and thin, greeting her cheerfully when she walked into his bedroom that evening. _He_ wasn’t weak. _He_ wasn’t sniveling like a child over his predicament.

Well, neither would she.

Scully straightened her shoulders and drew a deep breath. She swallowed hard until the aching lump dislodged from her throat.

_Okay. Good. That’s good. I’m good._

She tidied her hair and hid the bloodied tissues under a mound of clean ones in his wastebasket. Then she unlocked the door.

Finola had gone from the kitchen. Pendrell sat alone at the table, his fork lying idle in his plate of uneaten food. He gave an anxious start when he saw Scully standing there, and he climbed to his feet.

Scully motioned him back down.

“Please,” she said. All false brightness and cheer, because her only alternative to that felt like a breakdown. “Don’t worry. I’m fine. It was just a nosebleed.”

He hesitated, one shaking hand still resting on the back of his chair.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m a doctor, aren’t I?”

Pendrell waited until she sat down before resuming his own seat. After she was settled, he pushed something against the edge of her plate. But he didn’t say anything.

Scully looked down. A tiny box wrapped in silver Happy Birthday paper lay on her fresh napkin.

“What—?” The desire to cry came back with a force that scared her. She was grateful Pendrell didn’t look up to see it. He was staring at the top of the table with a determined expression.

“Well, I told you I had something for you,” he said. “That night.”

 _That_ night. Scully dug deep into her memory and sure enough, it was there: the memory of him telling her he had something for her.

She touched the box with the tips of her fingers. The thin red ribbon was tied into a perfect bow.

“How did you even know it was my birthday?” she asked him.

“Oh.” He gave an embarrassed laugh. “Well, I was there when Mulder had the waitresses sing to you, so that’s how I found out. I just happened to be there. But I had this gift from before…months before. Only the paper is new.”

“ _Why_?”

Pendrell shrugged.

“It reminded me of you. Go on.” He nodded to the package.

So she picked it up. Faint, rust-colored specks covered one side of the wrapping. Pendrell lifted his eyes and saw them at the same time she did. He grimaced.

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be _sorry_.” Scully spoke almost harshly, but he didn’t seem offended by her tone.

She slid the ribbon from the package without untying it—“It’s too perfect”—and started prying back the tape. The box inside was plain white with a lid, like a jewelry box. For half a second, she thought it _was_ jewelry and fear seized her. But what lay on the nest of cotton was actually a tiny piece of curving bone, yellowed with age. A Celtic cross had been carved into the surface with painstaking precision, obviously by hand.

“I found it last summer when I was on vacation,” Pendrell said, answering the question she wasn’t sure how to ask. “In a flea market outside of Boston. It’s not real scrimshaw,” he added quickly, seeing the look on her face. “I mean…it’s not that old or worth that much. But I saw it and I…”

“What?”

“I thought of you.”

He was looking at the tiny, perfect piece of art that lay in her palm, not at her. Scully was glad of that.

“You kept it all that time?” She tried to say it lightly, but the words came out all wrong. Strangled, almost.

“Well, I needed an excuse.” He offered her a lopsided smile, as if acknowledging his own foolishness.

Scully shook her head.

“An excuse to what, Sean?” she asked.

“To give it to you.”

The simplicity of this response left her momentarily speechless. To cover her confusion, she turned the bone over in her hand, examining it from every angle. What patience it must have required to do that, she thought. A thousand tiny scratches in a piece of material no longer than her smallest finger.

“I’m glad you waited.” The words seemed inadequate, ungrateful. She cleared her throat and tried again. “It’s beautiful. Thank you…for thinking of me.”

“I always think of you,” he began. Then stopped, clearly shocked by his own audacity.

Under different circumstances, Scully might have laughed at the look on his face. But the notion of him thinking so highly of her, when she hadn’t thought of him at all, kept her from seeing the situation as remotely humorous.

“Were you sad that night?” she asked suddenly. It was something that had been gnawing at her. That he’d been in some kind of crisis, or pain, and she had callously tried to brush him aside. She’d been annoyed by the interruption when he caught her arm. She remembered wondering why he wouldn’t just leave her alone.

And then he nearly died on the floor in front of her.

“I’m sorry, Sean.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. I wasn’t sad.” He shrugged. “I was drunk.”

Why, though? It seemed so out of character for him, and there must be a reason. She wanted to know, but he clearly wasn’t planning to volunteer the information.

She cast about for a different topic, a safer one, and finally landed on his now-absent sister.

“Where is Finola?”

“She stepped out to take a call,” Pendrell explained, sounding relieved by her shift in tone. “Cell service isn’t great inside the building.”

“I hope I didn’t put her off her dinner—or you either.”

“God, no.” As if to prove the point, he picked up his fork and began picking at his neglected food.

Scully raised her eyebrows skeptically. But when he popped a piece of chicken into his mouth and began chewing it with an exaggerated “Mmmm” sound, she gave in and laughed.

“You really are something else, aren’t you?”

He grinned. “Oh, I’m such a doof. You’d love being friends with me.”

She picked up her own fork—if for no other reason than to see the pleased look on his face when she did it. “Well, I’m not a very good friend, I’m afraid.”

“I have lots of good friends. I don’t need another one.”

Scully looked up from her plate. Their eyes met. And this time, he didn’t look shy at all.

“Okay then,” she said softly.

His eyes lit up. 

“So, to bad friendship?” he asked.

“To bad friendship,” she told him.

And they toasted to it with their cans of soda.

***

Scully arrived at work almost half an hour early the following morning—the result of a headache that made sleeping any later an impossibility. Even so, she found Mulder already waiting for her in the office.

“What do you know about the Flatwoods Monster?” he asked, speaking, as usual, without preliminary.

Scully hung up her coat and turned to look at him. He was hunched over the desk—his desk—with what looked like the contents of several file folders spread out in front of him. Behind the glare of his reading glasses, his eyes looked tired, or hungover. Or both.

“I don’t know anything about it,” she told him. Which was an outright lie, but she wasn’t really in the mood to go over the little she did know and have him correct her on all that she didn’t get right.

Which wasn’t fair of her. And she knew that. But—

“I have an appointment with my oncologist at eleven. I’ll need to leave by 10:30 to make it.”

Mulder’s movements stilled. Not all at once, but with a sort of gradual idling down. Like a car stalling. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Is it…” His voice trailed away before he could finish.

The whole Mulder-engine was clearly in need of a tune-up, Scully thought. And part of her felt a hysterical desire to laugh.

“No treatment this morning” she told him, “It’s just an appointment to discuss lab work.”

“Well, are you feeling okay?” He sounded almost irritated now. Or, no. Not irritated. Anxious. Angry at his own sense of helplessness—and maybe even at hers.

And in some odd way it made her feel better knowing that he felt that way. Sometimes the only thing that got her up in the morning was the knowledge that he was getting up, too. That, whatever awful thing she was facing, he was facing with her.

“I’m fine,” she said quietly. Another lie. “I’m…the same.”

He nodded.

“I tried to call you last night. A couple of times, actually. You weren’t answering at your apartment and your cell went straight to voicemail.”

 _And I was worried._ The words hung between them, unspoken.

“Oh, I went to see Agent Pendrell. I forgot my phone in the car.” Lie number three, spoken so smoothly she almost impressed herself. She sat down in her chair, enjoying the look of open-mouthed surprise the words elicited from her partner.

“Pendrell is home?” he asked finally.

“He is. Three days ago, actually. Didn’t Skinner tell you?”

“I didn’t ask.” He sounded almost ashamed of himself. “How is he doing?”

“Good. Comparatively speaking, that is. He has a lot of recovering left to do.”

“Yeah. Of course.” Mulder sat back in his chair and folded his arms behind his head, the Flatwoods Monster temporarily forgotten. “You should have told me you were going,” he added. “I would have come with you.”

“I didn’t think of it.” She fiddled with her keys as she spoke, tracing the nail of her index finger over the lettering of her Apollo 11 keychain.

Mulder gave a laugh that was partly good-natured and mostly not. “Well, I’m sure Pendrell is glad you didn’t,” he said.

Scully looked up.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked.

He stared back at her, all wide-eyed innocence.

“Only that I know he would prefer to have you to himself. The Delectable Dr. Dana. I mean, who wouldn’t?”

She could have hit him for that.

“I wanted to apologize to him,” she said, once the desire had passed. “I mean, I _did_ apologize for what happened. That night. With Frish and…everything. I told Pendrell I was sorry. He was very gracious about it.”

“That wasn’t your fault, Scully.” Mulder’s voice was soft now, all the mockery gone from his expression.

“I know,” answered Scully. “It was yours.”

Silence.

She could tell from Mulder’s expression that he knew she was baiting him—and that he was finding it very, very hard not to rise to it.

She waited.

_One-one thousand._

_Two-one thousand._

_Three-one thousand._

_Four-one thousand._

He broke the silence on five, speaking in an even tone clearly intended to show her what a patient person he was.

“Did I do something to make you angry, Scully?”

“Not at all.” She met his gaze levelly, affecting a sort of vague puzzlement that she knew would drive him crazy. “Why? Do I seem angry with you?”

“To be honest, yes.”

“Well, I’m not.”

Dropping her keys to the desk, she reached out and tapped the sheaf of papers nearest her hand.

“So go ahead,” she told him. “Tell me about the Flatwoods Monster. I’m listening now.”

But she wasn’t. And both of them knew it.


	3. III

**III**

In medical school, one of the prevailing pieces of wisdom was that doctors made the worst patients. Scully always assumed her professors were joking when they said this. Or, if not joking, then jaded by their years in the field. She told herself that even after she became a doctor, she would remain the best patient a physician could hope to see. She would be pleasant; she would respect the medical professionals in charge of her care; and she would never throw her own skills or experiences up in their faces.

Of course, she’d been one hundred percent wrong about all of that.

It wasn’t even just the cancer, either. Over the years, she had been guilty of second-guessing GPs and gynecologists, ER doctors and oral surgeons. It was just something that happened when you got good, she figured. You started having confidence in yourself, and you lost trust in everyone else.

Not that she went out of her way to antagonize the oncologist in charge of her now. She’d always had a healthy respect for specialists, and she tried hard not to compare what he told her to data she found herself in medical journals or online. She tried not judge him too harshly if he fell short. During her appointments, she really did make every effort to act the part of a patient and not a doctor.

But she also knew when she was being bullshitted.

Dr. Donovan would never have classified it as that, of course. To him, it was “bedside manner.” Something he learned in Introduction to Humanities, or at the side of a senior physician during his residency. Scully had learned it, too. And so she knew exactly what he was up to when he began cheerfully talking to her about “exploring different avenues of treatment.”

“So the current treatment didn’t work,” she interrupted him.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say that.” Another line of bullshit, obviously.

“Has the mass responded at all?” she asked. 

Donovan relented.

“Not according to what I’m seeing here,” he admitted. “Additionally, you’re showing signs of lymphocyte infiltration in the area of the mass.”

“You mean lymphoepithelioma.” She wasn’t asking him, and Dr. Donovan knew that. He grimaced.

“I need to schedule some more tests to be sure,” he said carefully. “But it would appear so, yes.”

Scully pressed her knuckles against her forehead and took a deep breath. _Fuck._

“Okay,” she said. “Has it metastasized?”

“Not yet. Not that we’ve found.” His tone lifted in an encouraging way that she knew was meant to foster hope in the hopeless. “So that’s good news, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” She raised her eyebrows. “I’ve done six weeks of chemotherapy. I’ve done radiation.”

“You’ve completed one session of each, that’s all. There’s no reason why you can’t do another.”

“To what purpose?” she asked, annoyed by his false optimism. His patronizing tone. “If it isn’t responding…”

“There’s a clinical trial starting in—” he checked his paperwork “—two weeks. I think you would be a good candidate for it.”

“Experimental drugs.”

“Chemotherapy,” he corrected. “Really no different than what you’ve just finished, except that this combination showed great promise in the lab, particularly with keratinizing squamous cell carcinomas such as yours.”

Scully digested this in silence.

“I don’t know about that,” she said finally.

“Why not?” he pressed.

Because she was afraid, that was why. It was bad enough to subject herself to a known cocktail of poisons; she wasn’t sure she wanted to hazard the untried variety. It wasn't just that, either. In a clinical trial, there was always the risk of drawing the short straw and being given standard treatment anyway—and she already knew the standard treatment wouldn’t work.

She told the doctor as much.

“Given your line of work...your age…and your medial history…I think we could take measures to ensure that wouldn’t happen.”

Scully stared at him. “That’s rather unethical, don’t you think?” she asked. “Why should my line of work have anything to do with a blind trial? Why should I be given preferential treatment over other patients?”

“Now hang on.” He held up his hands in a “stop, don’t shoot” gesture and shook his head. “I think you misunderstood my intentions. I never once said…”

She knew exactly what he said, and what he’d meant. And it disgusted her.

Still, it seemed like a pretty poor plan to have an argument with her oncologist now, particularly when she knew that he had been, in his own way, trying to help.

Scully thought about what Mulder would say if she told him. He would tell her to enroll in the trial. He would want her to take every unfair advantage the doctor was willing to offer her.

She sighed.

“I need to be able to work,” she told Dr. Donovan. “Can you guarantee I’ll be well enough to do that while I'm on this trial?”

“Now, Dr. Scully, you know I can’t guarantee anything at all. All I can do is offer my opinion as a specialist.”

“And that opinion is?”

“I think you should register for the trial,” he said. “I think it’s the best shot you’ve got.”

He said “best” shot, but Scully was a doctor and she knew what he really meant. He meant her only shot. He meant her last one.

***

She signed up for the trial.

It took longer than she expected. When she finished it was almost noon, and her stomach was rumbling. She stopped at the machine in the lobby and bought a bottle of water and a jumbo pack of peanut M&Ms, figuring she could have a quick snack in the car on the drive back to work. It was grossly unhealthy, of course, but then again so was she. And she hated wasting even more time getting lunch. Mulder was probably pacing the floor of their office like a caged lion, waiting for her to get back.

That was what she told herself. But sitting in her car a few minutes later, she found her desire for both the chocolate and her partner’s company severely lacking. For a long time after she turned the ignition, she just sat there with the car in park and the engine running.

She didn’t cry; she wouldn’t let herself do that. But, inside, it felt as if her heart was bleeding.

You can’t see Mulder like this, she told herself. He would panic. And a panicked Mulder was a miserable thing to have to deal with when she wasn’t dying of cancer. Let alone now, when she was.

No, she definitely couldn’t face seeing Mulder yet. She couldn’t face work. Or lunch. Or anything even approaching her everyday life.

She looked at the package of candy thoughtfully for a minute. Then she reached for the gearshift and put the car in motion.

And she drove to Pendrell’s apartment.

***

A different redhead answered the door this time. A middle-aged man, somewhat taller than Pendrell, who introduced himself as “Colin, the oldest.” Scully was sure she had never spoken to him before, but he greeted her as if he knew exactly who she was.

“Back again today,” he said cheerfully. “Well, then.”

Scully gave him an uncertain smile. “I should have called first. I keep saying that but I…”

“Not at all.” He opened the door wider, and now Scully could see the stretch of living room and kitchen behind him. Pendrell was sitting on the sofa playing a harmonica while a pretty, dark-haired woman perched on the corner of his coffee table and watched intently.

Scully shot Colin-the-oldest a questioning look.

“Pulmonary therapy,” he explained. “It’s his first in-home session.”

“I shouldn’t bother him then,” Scully began. But Colin shook his head.

“They’re nearly done,” he said. “Come on in.”

After half a second of hesitation, she did. Colin led her to the kitchen side of the great room so they could watch the action without interrupting it.

“It shouldn’t be much longer,” he said. “She’s been putting him through his paces for almost half an hour.”

“He’s good.” Scully spoke with some surprise. Of all the skills she might have attributed to Pendrell, playing a musical instrument was not one of them.

His brother smiled.

“It’s supposed to be good for his lungs, I guess. Like the breathing exercises that she was having him do earlier. She brought the harmonica with her, but I’m sure she had no idea he would be such a show off about it.”

Just as Colin said this, the music ended in an abrupt burst of coughing. The respiratory therapist reached over and patted Pendrell’s knee.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s your stopping place. You lose your breath, you stop; you start coughing, you stop. You don’t get points for pushing yourself too hard. Got it?”

He nodded.

“Good.” She checked her watch. “That’s about it for today anyway. You’ve done incredibly well. A couple more weeks and you won’t need me at all.”

“My hook will bring you back.”

Scully had no idea what Pendrell meant by that, but the therapist obviously did. She laughed as she got to her feet.

“Day after tomorrow,” she told him. “And I want practice until then. Three ten-minute sessions a day.”

He pointed the harmonica at her. “On that you can rely.”

“Troublemaker.” She smiled as she said it. “I knew I couldn’t trust that red hair.”

Scully could feel Colin’s eyes on her as she watched this scene play out. She wondered if her face gave away how uncomfortable she felt. How—well, not jealous. Of course not jealous. She didn’t know Pendrell well enough for jealousy. But self-conscious. Like an intruder in his life.

Then he turned his head and saw her standing there, and the happiness that lit those blue eyes made all of her uncertainty feel very foolish indeed.

She felt strange, too, in a way. In her experience, intense focus from a man (Mulder excluded) usually meant something negative—sexual obsession, or deceit, or how-about-I wash-your-hair-before-murdering-you-in-the-bathtub-and-taking-your-fingers-for-a-trophy—and she’d come to distrust male scrutiny (Mulder’s excluded) as a result. Yet she didn’t find anything unsettling in Pendrell’s attention. The way he looked at her felt—well—

_Good._

“Hi, Dana.”

She smiled at the way he said it. The way his whole demeanor changed and became bashful in her presence. It felt like a compliment, somehow. An indication of her own importance in the world.

Scully waited for him to lift his hand in response to the therapist’s goodbye, a little amused by his sudden indifference toward her. (Not so interested in teasing the pretty brunette now, are you, Sean?)

Then, once the woman had gone, “I hope it’s okay that I stopped by. I was just—”

“Yeah, of course,” He trampled over the end of her sentence in his eagerness to reassure her. “It—it’s really good to see you.”

“—on my lunch break,” she finished. “In the neighborhood.”

Pendrell didn’t question why she would be having lunch alone, or in an area so inconvenient to work.

“Have you eaten?” he asked instead. “Finola and my parents are picking up lunch now. If you’d like to stay, we’d love to have you.”

“Thank you, but I can’t. I just came by to—”

She stopped, unsure of how to finish the sentence. What, exactly, had she come to do?

Pendrell saved her from having to come up with an answer.

“Sit down for a minute anyway,” he said. "Even if you can't stay."

Scully glanced at Colin, who, to her relief, seemed to have lost interest in the situation. He retreated further into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee.

“All right. For a minute.” She joined Pendrell on the couch.

While technically dressed today, the baggy sweatpants and faded Bruins shirt he was wearing might as well have been pajamas. He hadn't shaved, either. Scully could tell he felt self-conscious about it by the way he kept running his hand over his jaw.

She felt an absurd urge to reach out and do the same. To feel the prickle of stubble and the softness of his skin. To trace her thumb across that full bottom lip and watch it tremble against her. To kiss him the way he'd probably been dreaming of her doing for months now.

But she couldn't do it. He was so sweet. And he looked so young. Nothing about him reminded her of the men she usually found attractive, and somehow, that was the most appealing thing of all. He was untarnished. She didn't want to be the thing that ruined him.

“Was that Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’ you were playing just now?” Scully spoke with false cheer, but at least she was saying something. At least her mind was turning to something innocuous. 

“Huh?” Pendrell looked at the harmonica in his hand and gave a little laugh. “Well, sort of.”

“You’re very good.”

“I taught myself in college.” He saw her questioning look and went on. “I graduated high school two years early, so when I got to college I was younger than everybody else. And, well, I found it hard to make friends.”

“So you taught yourself to play harmonica?” Scully wasn’t sure she understood the connection.

“I taught myself all kinds of tricks,” he explained. “Things to do so I wouldn’t just be the young one.”

“You’d be the one who played harmonica.”

He shrugged. “Or who juggled, or told jokes, or did handstands—” He stopped to think. “Or played ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ on the ukulele.”

“Did it work?”

“Having something to do with my hands and my brain helped me to be less nervous around people. That’s what worked.”

She thought about him in the lab, waxing rhapsodic over computer chips and forensic fibers. That worked, too, she realized. He never stumbled over a word like _photopolymerization_ in her presence, but let her ask him how his day had gone and he’d struggle with a simple “Fine.”

He wasn’t shy with Mulder, though. Just like he hadn’t been shy with his respiratory therapist. In fact, the only person he seemed to be nervous around these days was Scully herself.

She leaned over and nudged his shoulder with her own just to watch him blush.

“I brought you something, Sean.”

The corner of his mouth quirked up. “You did?”

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the M&Ms with a little flourish. “Careful though,” she said as she handed them to him. “They aren’t macro.”

“I’ll tell Finola a doctor prescribed them so she can’t complain.”

Scully laughed. “And somewhere my Stanford nutrition professor just got a cold chill down his back.”

Pendrell ripped open the bag and tipped a couple of candies into his palm. He handed one to Scully before popping the other into his own mouth.

“The building blocks of life are actually sugar cubes,” he said, chewing. “That’s my theory.”

Scully was about to joke that she hoped he hadn’t written his dissertation on it when her cellphone trilled, startling them both. She looked at the number.

Mulder.

_Shit._

“I need to go.”

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Pendrell asked.

“No. I just…need to go.” She stuffed the phone back into her pocket and stood up. She couldn’t look at his face now. She knew what she would see in his eyes if she did.

“Well, thanks for the…” He held up the M&Ms.

Scully nodded and turned. But halfway to his front door, she paused and looked back over her shoulder. Pendrell was still sitting on the sofa with the candy bag clutched in his fist. He looked so young, she thought again. So fragile. Like one wrong move from her would shatter him into pieces.

“I’m probably going out of town,” she told him.

Pendrell absorbed this information in silence, although his brow furrowed a little as if he were trying to work out what it meant.

Scully made it easy for him.

“There’s a case in Braxton County, West Virginia,” she went on. “Some people filed a report about—well, never mind what they filed a report about. But Agent Mulder wants to interview them in person. We’ll probably be gone a few days.”

“All right.”

“Could I come see you when I get back?”

“Sure—I mean—sure.”

Scully smiled. She started to go, but the sound of his voice stopped her again at the doorway.

“Dana.” He was using that tone she liked. Soft and coaxing.

“Yes, Sean?”

“Take care of yourself out there.”

"I will," Scully promised.

She didn't have the heart to tell him that there was no point. That the real danger lay in her own sinus cavity, not the West Virginia woods.

***

When Scully got back to the office half an hour later, she found Mulder still at his desk, studying blurry pictures of what he’d insisted earlier was a recent sighting of the Flatwoods Monster. He threw his magnifying glass down when he saw her come in.

“Damn it, Scully!" His voice was hoarse, and angry in a way she had come to expect. "Where the hell have you been all day?”

“My oncologist appointment.” She pulled out her chair and sat down.

“For three and a half hours?”

She looked at her watch, surprised. Had it really been that long?

“I…he wants me to sign up for a clinical trial. It took longer than I thought.”

Mulder frowned, the anger draining out of his face as though he'd sprung a leak. “What kind of trial?” he asked.

“Chemotherapy. The other didn’t work.” She did her best to sound offhanded, but of course, Mulder saw through it. He stood up and walked around the desk to stand next to her.

“When does it start?”

“Two weeks from now, he said. I should still be able to work,” she added. “I asked him about that specifically.” She didn’t tell Mulder that the doctor hadn’t actually answered the question.

“I don’t care about that,” Mulder said shortly.

“I do.”

One of his hands dropped to her shoulder and squeezed hard.

“Well, I have a good feeling about this,” he said. “Advances in modern medicine happen rapidly and drug trials are closely monitored and—and—”

“What?”

“I think it’ll work,” he finished lamely.

She looked up at him, marveling at how lost he looked. None of his usual cockiness at all.

“Maybe it will,” she said. But suddenly she felt very tired.

_I thought you were supposed to be encouraging me, Mulder. Not the other way around._

“I believe it will.” He sounded insistent now; his grip on her shoulder hurt. Scully reached down and pried his hand away.

“You believe a lot of things, Mulder. Not all of them are going to be true.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song referenced in this chapter is “Hook” by Blues Traveler. You guys may have realized that even if Scully didn’t, but I thought I’d mention it just in case. There will be a lot of 90’s references scattered throughout, both because that’s when the story is set, and because I’m old enough that nostalgia has become a thing with me. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. ;)
> 
> As always, thank you to all who take the time to read this story, with special love for those who leave kudos/feedback. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.


	4. IV

**IV**

There was nothing in Flatwoods, West Virginia. Scully couldn’t say she was surprised by this. The entire town consisted of a scant collection of fast food restaurants, a few houses, and a whole lot of open farmland. That was it. Despite a wooden sign at the edge of town proclaiming it the “Home of the Green Monster,” there was absolutely no evidence that such a thing had ever existed, let alone returned after a forty-year hiatus to terrify the locals.

The only real mystery was that Mulder refused to see it. For four days, Scully trailed after him through fields and forests, mobile homes and houses, diners and gas stations. She listened to him wheedle stories out of residents who were varying degrees of unfriendly, if not downright hostile. People who, for the most part, didn’t appear to have the faintest idea what her partner was talking about when he inquired about shadowy creatures in the woods. The few that did know seemed more concerned about being made to look foolish than ending up the victims of an alien probing.

The subjects of their case, a married couple in their forties who claimed to have seen the monster while hunting for morel mushrooms the previous spring, changed their stories at least as often as they changed the methadone patches on their upper arms. Each day Scully sat while Mulder went over their accounts of the sighting again.

And again.

And _again._

And each day her patience wore a little thinner.

“These people are a couple of tweakers, Mulder,” she finally told him.

“That’s an unfair stereotype,” he protested. They were having dinner on their fourth—and, Scully hoped, final—evening in Flatwoods. Having exhausted the familiar chain restaurants, Mulder had dragged her to the only other promising-looking game in town: a diner called Maude’s Place.

Now, he pointed a French fry at her accusingly and added, “You’re making snap judgments about them based on the locale. If this were San Francisco, or New York, or Boston, you wouldn’t say that.”

Actually, she would. She had watched the McDonoughs pick and twitch through every one of their interviews. She’d seen their dilated pupils and the sores at the corners of their mouths. She had heard their stories, which only served to highlight their tenuous grasps on reality—and she knew, without a doubt, that methadone was the least of their vices.

But there was no point in arguing with Mulder. He would follow this road to its inevitable conclusion, and he would figure it out. But she couldn’t rush him. Experience had taught her that.

So, she drank her coffee and ordered a slice of pie that she forgot to eat, and she watched him sort through the scads of notes and images he had collected over the past few days. And she tried to be patient.

But the mention of Boston made her think of Pendrell, and her attention began to drift. She hadn’t tried calling Pendrell while they were in Flatwoods; she wasn’t sure why. Although she had consistently forgotten to ask him for them herself, both his home and cell numbers were listed in the FBI directory. She knew he wouldn’t mind that she had looked them up. Hell, he would probably be delighted that she had looked them up. And she was concerned about him, if only from a purely medical standpoint. If she called, she told herself, she could assess the sound of his breathing over the phone. She could ask him how his respiratory therapy was going. She could find out if he had gained weight, or if he’d gotten the dressing removed from his chest. She could reassure herself. She could let herself be reassured.

But she didn’t call. She just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

She toyed with her cell phone, wondering if perhaps there was something fundamentally wrong with her. She could face kidnappers, serial killers, and literal monsters and not lose much sleep over any of them. Yet the idea of fostering a real human connection with someone decent and good—someone very likely worthy of it—left her feeling anxious and out of control. She wanted to talk to him. She wanted to know he was all right.

But she wasn’t sure she wanted to want that.

Mulder was more than enough to think about, to worry over. Why should she burden herself more? It was foolish, she thought. Especially now. It was shortsighted and it was selfish—

“Scully?” Mulder looked up from his notes, distracting her from her own thoughts.

“What?”

“I’d like to go to the woods again.”

The sentence hadn’t fully left his mouth when Scully let out a groan. “Mulder, _why?_ ” Because they had been to that spot half a dozen times already and they hadn’t found a damn thing.

“Scully, I know you think these people aren’t trustworthy, but you saw the pictures. Something was out in the woods that night. They have proof.”

“They have a handful of extremely blurry images of a _shadow_ , Mulder.”

“A shadow of what, though? That’s the question.”

Scully leaned back in her chair, studying the excitement on his face. Six months ago, she might have found his blind devotion to the idea charming.

“An owl, maybe? The shape of the face would fit…and the gliding movement they described. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a monster—or an alien,” she added.

“You’re so sure.”

“About this particular case? Yes, I am. These people are looking for attention, Mulder, and they found it in you. There’s no monster here.”

Mulder looked hurt by her words. “You know what your problem is, Scully,” he began. And she braced herself for a soliloquy on faith and its connection to the supernatural.

Then he stopped, and his hazel eyes widened almost imperceptibly. Scully whipped her head around to see if someone had pulled a gun on them.

And then she felt the blood.

“ _Fuck._ ”

“Let me help you.” Mulder grabbed a wad of napkins from the dispenser and reached for her, but he was clumsy. His elbow brushed against her glass and tipped it over, spilling water all over his paperwork. “Fuck!” Now he said it. It would have been funny under different circumstances.

“I’ve got this; you get that,” Scully told him. She slid out of the booth and jogged toward the ladies’ room with a napkin held to her face.

Inside, the facilities were filthy and poorly lit. Scully twisted the handle at the only sink and lukewarm water issued forth in a feeble drizzle that smelled faintly of sulfur.

_I’ll probably end up with hepatitis next._

She stuck paper towels under the water anyway, figuring that the hepatitis couldn’t possibly kill her before the cancer did, and, anyway, she had to clean herself up. Her lips and chin were a mess.

Two nosebleeds in less than a week. It might just be a one-off. A fluke. It might be a reaction to the humidity of the West Virginia spring, or the copious amounts of pollen in the woods. It might be from the stress of this ridiculous case.

Or, it might mean that the cancer was progressing. Dr. Donovan had called the tumor’s growth “negligible” at her last appointment. But what did that mean, really? A millionth of a millimeter sounded like nothing until it was pressing against the capillaries in one’s nasopharynx. Maybe the tumor’s interference had become such that her nose would bleed frequently from now on. Maybe this was going to be her life.

Until it wasn’t anymore. Until it ended.

The face in the mirror crumpled, and Scully fought hard not to give in to the impulse to cry. Because she wasn’t weak, damn it. She wasn’t going to let this thing beat her.

“Scully?”

She lifted her head at the sound of her name. According to her watch, almost a quarter of an hour had passed since she left the table.

“Are you all right?” Mulder’s voice sounded faint, but fearful. Scully knew he was seconds away from kicking down the door. His usual method of problem-solving—just plow right in like a bull through a China shop and hope for the best.

“I’m fine, Mulder.” But Scully knew that she didn’t sound fine. She sounded angry. All of a sudden, she _was_ angry. She was so mad she could have reached into her pocket and thrown her cell phone at the door.

But she didn’t.

Instead, she smoothed her hair and straightened her clothes; she buttoned her jacket to cover the water spots on her blouse.

And then she opened the door for him.

“All set?” Her smile was so stiff it hurt her face.

Mulder held a sheaf of sodden printouts in his fist. His eyes were tired and anxious. “Sh—should we call a doctor?” he asked. His free hand hovered over her arm as if asking for permission to touch it.

“I _am_ a doctor,” Scully answered. She pushed past him and walked back to the dining area. A busboy was wiping down their booth, which meant Mulder must have paid the bill already. She strode by it without pausing and he trailed along behind, uncharacteristically quiet. Out the door and across the gravel parking lot to their rental car— _crunch, crunch, crunch_ —without a single word spoken between them. It might have been a record.

It occurred to Scully to walk to the driver’s side of the car for a change. To make a stand for herself, to take the wheel. Mulder never let her drive—

But she didn’t do that, either.

For one thing, she didn’t feel up to fighting him about it. For another, she was afraid that he _wouldn’t_ fight her. That he would do that thing where he was tender and accommodating, which was even worse than when he did that thing where he acted like an asshole. She didn’t want him to do either. She just wanted him to behave normally, and to treat her normally and not like a hospice patient.

Her head began to hurt as she climbed into the passenger seat. The strange, singular throbbing that she knew was the tumor pressing down. She rubbed the heel of her hand against her forehead and exhaled slowly.

_Not tonight, damn it. Not in front of—_

“We should probably get back to the motel.” Mulder was glancing over as he spoke, dividing his time between her face and the highway in front of him. Scully tilted her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes, willing her features into a neutral position.

“If that’s what you want.” She tried not to sound too relieved, but the idea of spending another night wandering through tick-infested woods did not appeal.

“I think it’s for the best,” Mulder answered. He reached across the gearshift and took her hand. “I’ll go back out to the forest alone. It’s all right.”

Scully was careful not to react to this. She didn’t pull her hand away; she didn’t even lift her head from the seat. After all, she wanted him to treat her normally, didn’t she? Well, this was normal for him. For _them._ Mulder running off into the dead of night in pursuit of something absurd, while she waited for him with only the most vague understanding of what he had planned—this was what they did. It wasn’t fair for her to say she wasn’t okay with it now.

Still, she could tell that Mulder was struggling with it, his concern for her conflicting with his desire to find the truth. “You sure you’ll be okay alone?” He was drumming his fingers against the steering wheel as he spoke, taking the final turn in their journey a little too sharply.

Scully opened her eyes. The motel loomed ahead in the darkness, its faded walls and empty parking lot somehow even more depressing because they were becoming so familiar to her. Mulder pulled the car into the usual spot, just between the entrances of their two rooms. Scully sighed.

“I’ll be fine, Mulder. Will you?” Of course, she knew even before he answered. He would be perfect. There was no monster in those goddamn woods anyway.

“I just…” He looked at her with those eyes. His puppy look, she privately called it, even though it almost always accompanied the divulgence of something terrible—or something he believed to be terrible. Now was no exception. “I don’t want to be a bad…”

A bad what? Scully wondered, but she knew he would never put it into words. He couldn’t. And she found herself thinking about Pendrell again. _I have lots of good friends; I don’t need another one._

“You’re not a bad anything, Mulder,” she said. And she meant it, even though she knew it wasn’t strictly true. “We’re here to solve a case. I’m not going to think less of you for striving to do that.”

He nodded slowly. Scully patted his arm and opened the car door.

“I’ll call you when I get back in.” His voice sounded uncertain in a way that she hated. Mulder was never uncertain; in his profession, he couldn’t afford to be. Only the cancer brought that out in him.

“If you want,” she said, climbing out. “I might not answer right away. I think I’m going to take a bath.”

“You should. You should rest.” He spoke so gently, so unlike himself, that Scully felt another surge of irrational anger. She slammed the car door harder than necessary just to relieve her feelings.

“Good night, Mulder. And good luck.”

She could feel the weight of his gaze on her back as she walked to her door, so she kept her head up, her spine straight. Because she knew, without having to look, that he would wait until she was safely inside before he drove away.

What she didn’t know was why he thought it would make a difference. Mulder couldn’t keep her safe anymore. No one could.

***

The motel bathtub was too shallow for soaking; Scully was irritated with herself for having forgotten that. She opted for a shower instead, standing under the blessedly adequate stream of hot water until her skin lobstered and the pounding in her head eased back into minor discomfort.

Afterward, she tried to summon the energy to drag out her laptop and type a few paragraphs in her case report, but it was no good. The assignment felt too meandering, too pointless, to commit to words. Anyway, the headache had left her tired. She curled up in bed to stare at the television instead. The local station was showing a snowy “Thursday Night Movie” edit of _Escape from the Planet of the Apes_. Mulder would be sorry he missed it.

At half-past nine, her cell phone rang, pulling her out of a doze.

“Scully.” She tried to stifle a yawn as she spoke.

“Dana?”

Drowsy as she was, a smile spread across her face at the sound of her name. Quickly, she pulled herself into a sitting position and reached for the remote to mute the TV.

“Sean.”

Pendrell must have caught the note of surprise in her voice, because his own became just a little more diffident. “I—I found your number in my cell,” he explained. “From returning calls at the lab. I guess I should have asked first, but I…Well, I hope it’s okay that I…”

“Of course it’s okay,” she reassured him. Then, a little wryly, “Actually, I looked you up in the directory for the same purpose, so I don’t suppose I _could_ mind without being something of a hypocrite.”

Ten full seconds of silence followed. Scully knew the effect the words must have had on him, and she didn’t try to prompt him. Instead, she listened to the sound of his breathing, the faint beat of music playing somewhere in the background. It took her a moment to recognize the song.

“Is that ‘Love Rollercoaster?’” She found herself laughing at the incongruity of it—shy Agent Pendrell listening to raucous 1970s funk while he struggled to find something to say to her.

“It happens to be, yes.”

The way he said it—with a kind of obvious put-on dignity—made her laugh even harder.

“I never would have taken you for a fan of the Ohio Players, Sean.”

“Red Hot Chili Peppers, actually, and it’s a good cover.” But he laughed, too, as if conceding to the ridiculousness of the song. Scully had forgotten how nice his laugh was and how easy it was to laugh with him. She could feel the knotted muscles at the base of her skull beginning to relax for the first time in days.

“It’s really good to hear from you,” she told him.

“Yeah?”

“I kept meaning to call but…” She trailed away, at a loss as to how to finish.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You’ve been busy. Are you still in West Virginia?”

“For tonight. I’m hoping we can wrap things up tomorrow and head home.”

“You sound ready. Isn’t the investigation going well?”

“It hasn’t been very productive,” she admitted. He was being so kind, so intuitive, that part of her wished she could go on, that she could vent all her frustrations about the case, her partner, her job, life in general, death in particular. She knew he wouldn’t think less of her for it if she did.

But she also knew that wouldn’t be fair to him. Or to Mulder, either, for that matter. So she said, instead, “Actually, I’m ready to think about something else for a while. Tell me about your life.”

“My life?” Pendrell seemed at a loss as to how to answer. His life was evidently not something he found particularly newsworthy.

“Tell me how you’re feeling. You don’t sound as hoarse.”

“Oh, I’m all right. I’m supposed to start taking walks every day…to build up my lung function.” She could hear him fiddling with the radio as he spoke, switching stations as rapidly as Mulder surfed channels on TV.

“How is that going?”

“It’s boring. I’d like to get back to work.”

Scully thought of him in the Sci-Crime lab—his quick movements, his quick mind. He must be miserable stuck at home, she realized suddenly. It must be driving him crazy.

“How long do you expect it will be?” she asked.

“A good two weeks according to my doctor. Then light duty.” He gave a chuckle and added, “Whatever that means. I told her I work in a forensics lab; it’s all light duty.”

Scully knew that wasn’t true, but she liked the self-deprecating way he said it. She liked, too, the impatience she heard in his words. The desire to be active and useful was something she could appreciate.

“Well, we’ll certainly be glad to have you back at the lab.”

“You will?”

Scully had spoken without much consideration, but Pendrell sounded so flattered she found herself elaborating. “The other techs aren’t as versatile,” she told him. “They aren’t as thorough. There’s a reason Agent Mulder and I always ask for you.”

Pendrell made a soft sound in his throat. “Well that’s—”

He didn’t finish, but Scully thought she knew what he meant. She lay back against her pillow and smiled.

“So what are you doing?”

“You mean right now? Besides talking to you?” He gave the matter what she thought was an inordinate amount of consideration. “Nothing, really. Listening to music. I’ve been having trouble sleeping.”

“Are you uncomfortable?”

“Not really. It’s more like…when I go to sleep I dream about it. That night.” He forced a laugh. “It’s probably stupid.”

“Of course it’s not stupid; it’s natural. It will pass.” But Scully knew she was lying to him. Years after the fact, she still dreamed about her abduction. Decades after the fact, Mulder still dreamed about Samantha. Some traumas had lasting effects; some wounds would not heal. It made her sad to realize that she had given Pendrell his first permanent scar. She stared up at the water-spotted ceiling and wished she had the words to tell him how much she regretted that.

Pendrell had finally settled on a new station: a Paul McCartney sound-alike singing about starting a revolution from his bed.

“Can I ask you something, Sean?”

“Sure.”

“How did you know you wanted to work for the Bureau?”

He hesitated. “You want to know the truth?”

“Of course.”

“I didn’t. They recruited me.”

“You’re kidding.” Scully was impressed. The FBI rarely bothered looking for employees; qualified applicants came to them. “How did that happen?” she asked.

“They contacted me when I was finishing grad school at Northwestern. There was a shortage of qualified people applying for the lab, I guess. I was getting my PhD in biotechnology, so they must have thought I was a good candidate.”

“You must have been thrilled.”

He laughed and turned up the radio a little. “Well, my dad was excited.”

His dad, the retired Lieutenant Colonel. Scully couldn't remember exactly what he looked like, but she pictured him as something like her own father. Ahab in an Army uniform. “And you weren’t excited?” she asked Pendrell.

“It isn’t that. I was working on my dissertation; I hadn’t considered what would come after it. I didn’t know what I wanted, so when he seemed so pleased I just went along with it and enrolled in the Academy. I’m happy that I did,” he added quickly. “I love my job.”

“Then you’re fortunate.” Scully spoke with more bitterness than she intended. She could feel Pendrell’s start of surprise from almost three hundred miles away.

“You don’t love your job?” he asked.

“I used to. Sometimes I still do. It’s taken a lot of out of me.” She touched her forehead as she spoke. Although the headache was nearly gone now, the spot between her eyes felt tender, like a bruise.

Pendrell was quiet for a moment. Scully imagined him chewing on his bottom lip as he thought of something to say. It might have been annoying, that premeditation; she might have distrusted it. Except she knew him now, and she knew that whatever consideration he gave his words was only because he cared so deeply about her reaction to them.

“You’ve put a lot into it,” he said finally. And she smiled in spite of herself, knowing that he was silently kicking himself for his lack of eloquence.

“That, too,” she agreed.

“Dana, for what it’s worth…”

“What?”

“I think you’re brilliant at what you do.” His voice went very soft then, barely competing with the guitars in the background as he went on, “And the things you put into it—they make a difference in the world. Even if it doesn’t always seem that way, they do.”

For the second time that evening, Scully felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes. Not from sadness this time, or pain, or fear, but some indefinable emotion that made the ache in her heart ease just a little bit.

“That’s actually worth a lot, Sean," she said. "Thank you.”

"Hey, any time. Any time at all." And even though she couldn't see his face, Scully knew that he was smiling at her. 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of things about this chapter. First of all, I have no idea what Agent Pendrell's job actually was within the context of the show. God knows, I spent enough time trying to figure it out, but...nope, no clue. It was mentioned a couple of times that he worked in the "Sci-Crime Lab," which does not appear to be an actual thing at the FBI. In fact, despite the show tagging lab scenes as "FBI Headquarters, Washington D.C." the FBI Laboratory isn't actually located at Headquarters or even in D.C.--it's at Marine Corps Base Quantico in--you guessed it--Quantico, Virginia. And a tech who analyzes plant fibers probably isn't going to be running tests on computer chips or airbags regardless of where he works, so...yeah. My findings conclude that Pendrell was some kind of scientific wunderkind who existed outside the normal planes of reality within the FBI. Which is all kinds of fine by me. It just means you guys can't come for me when I make things up to fill the gaps.
> 
> Speaking of coming for me, please don't be offended by my portrayal of Flatwoods. I've never actually been to West Virginia, so I essentially based my descriptions on pictures I found online and also on my own small, rural southern hometown, which I'm certain Scully would have hated with equal vehemence. It was by no means intended as an insult to the citizens of that region.
> 
> There were a couple of songs cited in this chapter. The first, "Love Rollercoaster" was name checked by the characters. The second is "Don't Look Back in Anger" by Oasis. I said there would be 90s references and I meant it. 
> 
> And, finally, I'm very sorry about the delay between chapters. For some reason, this installment just kicked my butt. I'm still not happy with the ending, but it was either move on or fall into an endless spiral of rewriting and editing. I'm flying without a Beta, so some allowances have to be made. I hope you guys understand and that you enjoy the story despite its flaws. As always, thank you for taking the time to read it. Special love goes to those who go the extra mile and leave a kudos or review, because my ego is fragile and it appreciates the encouragement.


	5. V

**V**

It was almost four a.m. before Mulder got back to the motel. Scully heard him in her sleep, the slam of the car door penetrating a dream about cruising along the Chesapeake Bay with her family. It was a good dream. She could taste the salt air and feel the solid warmth of her father’s shoulder as she braced against him when the boat began to heel. She wanted to stay there, but something—duty, or loyalty, or even just plain old force of habit—forced her eyes to open. She sat up and looked at the clock.

_Fucking Mulder._

For a moment, she was tempted to just roll over and go back to sleep. But she knew that she wouldn’t be able to do that even if she tried. So, she crawled out of bed and pulled on her robe and slippers, and then she went outside and knocked on Mulder’s door.

He opened it immediately, a brown plastic ice bucket dangling from one hand, his mouth half open in surprise. “Scully, it’s almost four in the morning. Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

“I could say the same to you.” She paused. “Mulder, what the hell happened to you?” Because besides being covered in mud, he was also sporting an impressive shiner over his left eye.

Mulder shrugged. “My flashlight crapped out on me halfway back to the car,” he said sheepishly. “I stumbled down an embankment and then I sort of…ran into a tree…before I could catch myself.”

“You ran _into_ a tree?” 

“The ground was wet and I had my momentum behind me. I’m lucky I didn’t break my ass in the bargain.”

Maybe it was residual sleepiness, but the mental image his words evoked struck Scully as wildly funny. She found herself laughing at him as heartily as she had laughed at Pendrell some six hours before.

Mulder watched her with a bemused smile. “Well, I’m glad my misfortune could bring you a little joy, _Agent_ Scully.” 

“Always,” she assured him. But when her giggles subsided, she reached up to touch the edge of his cheekbone. “It looks pretty swollen. You should put some ice on it.”

He waved the bucket at her. “Already on it, doc.”

“I’ll go with you,” Scully offered. 

Mulder didn’t argue with her. She knew he wouldn’t.

They walked along the covered breezeway to a little alcove that housed the vending machines. When they got there, Scully leaned against the chipped stucco wall as Mulder examined the ice machine. At some point, the cooler must have malfunctioned, because the mound of loose ice chips in the bin had melted and then refrozen, leaving a solid slab that looked like a miniature glacier—something not exactly easy to remove with the metal serving scoop the motel provided. 

Mulder looked over at Scully with a sigh. “That’s Murphy's Law at work again,” he deadpanned.

“Do you want to try to find another ice machine?” Scully asked. “There might be a gas station or something near the highway.”

“I think I can manage.” He set the bucket in the middle of the slab and picked up the serving scoop.

Scully waited a bit. Then, when it became obvious Mulder would not volunteer the information, she asked, “So what _did_ you find in the woods tonight, Mulder?”

Mulder gave the ice an experimental jab with the metal scoop. “Not much,” he admitted. A few slivers of ice fell free, so he began chiseling in earnest. The loud, scraping sound that followed sent shivers down Scully’s spine. She winced.

“So, does that actually mean not much…or does it mean nothing?”

He looked over his shoulder at her. Scully couldn’t quite tell if his pout was sincere or if he was teasing her, but his voice was even when he asked, “Do you want me to tell you that you were right, Scully? Is that what this is about?”

“I don’t need you to tell me that.” She watched his face carefully as she spoke, but his expression didn’t change.

“No?” he asked. He turned back to the ice machine.

“No. As a matter of fact, I received a call this evening from a Deputy McGinnis at the Braxton County Sheriff’s Office.” The deputy had interrupted her conversation with Pendrell, which had been annoying even without taking into account what he had said. 

Mulder stabbed at the ice a little harder than necessary. “Sheriff’s Department,” he repeated. “What did he want?”

“He wanted to pass along some information about the case,” she said. “He wanted to let me know that he had picked up your friends the McDonoughs…and that they’re currently being housed at the Central Regional Jail here in Flatwoods.”

“What?” Finally, she had succeeded in getting a reaction out of him. Mulder dropped the ice scoop back into the bin with a clatter and turned to face her. “When did that happen?” he demanded.

“This evening. Around the time you headed into the woods, actually, although Deputy McGinnis didn’t call me until a few hours after.”

“And the charge?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Driving under the influence and possession of a controlled substance. Methamphetamine, to be precise.” Mulder groaned and put a hand to his face as she went on. “Apparently, they were picked up when they drove down an off ramp onto Interstate 79. They continued in the wrong direction for almost half a mile before an off-duty state trooper happened to spot them. It isn’t just that, though,” she added.

“What do you mean?”

“I requested medical background checks on each of them.” 

Mulder’s face reddened slightly.

“When did you do that?” he asked. 

“Two days ago. I received the results via email this evening.”

“And?”

She drew a breath. “And they aren’t exactly surprising. Both of them have been under psychiatric treatment over the past ten years. As it happens, they met each other in a ward. At the Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Hospital, a state-run facility in Huntington, West Virginia.” 

“Victims of abduction often experience psychiatric symptoms,” Mulder began, shaking his head. Scully cut him off. 

“They aren’t victims of an abduction, Mulder—or even of some random visitation from a woodland monster. Not even close. He’s schizophrenic, diagnosed in 1988. According to his chart, he’s prone to paranoid delusions, hallucinations, and disordered thinking.”

“What about her?”

“Schizoaffective disorder. Among other things, her chart describes her as ‘fantasy prone’ and ‘easily led.’”

“I suppose it’s a good thing you requested those charts, then. Isn’t it?” Mulder spoke without emotion, but anger seeped out of every pore.

Scully crossed her arms over her chest and stared back at him. “You think I shouldn’t have?” she challenged.

“I’m just wondering why you thought it was necessary—particularly since you didn’t bother informing me before you did it.”

“It was _necessary_ because those people are neither rational nor honest, Mulder! Anyone could see that except you!” Scully hadn’t meant to shout, but it was a relief to speak so plainly. A relief to let him know how frustrated she felt.

Mulder looked at her as though she had hit him.

“You could have talked to me about it, Scully. You didn’t have to go behind my back.” 

“I did talk to you,” she answered wearily. “You just didn’t listen.”

Silence. Mulder turned back to the ice machine. He picked up the scoop and began gouging at the ice as if he wanted to hurt it, although his voice was calm when he said, “Well, I’ve listened now. You’ve made your point. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

“I never said that, Mulder.” As much as she longed to be free of this ridiculous wild-goose chase of a case, Scully would never have told him that. It would have been too cruel. Especially now, when her time was so limited.

“Maybe not. But it’s true, isn’t it? We both know that.”

“What do you want me to say, Mulder?”

“I don’t want you to _say_ anything.” Giving up on the ice, Mulder hefted the half-full bucket into the crook of his arm. He didn’t look at her as he moved out of the alcove and back to the walkway. 

“There’s no reason to be angry,” she said, following him.

“I’m not angry,” Mulder insisted, although he still sounded as if he were. His head was down, his words directed at their feet as they headed back down the walkway. Scully had to trot to keep up with his long strides.

“No? What are you, then?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s it. That’s all.” 

“Sorry for _what_? It was a bad lead. It happens.”

“Not the case,” he snapped. “I’m not talking about the _case_. God, if it was just that I wouldn’t even—”

They had reached the door to his room now, but Scully knew that wasn’t why he had stopped talking. She caught him by the arm as he reached for the doorknob. 

“What?” she asked. “Tell me.”

He stood there, shoulders slumped and head drooping, looking so defeated that, for a moment, Scully’s anger drained away and she wished she could pull him into her arms. 

Instead, she reached up and touched his chin. He lifted his head, but he still wouldn’t quite meet her gaze. His eyes looked wet and sad in the dim light from the parking lot, but they persisted in focusing on everything except her.

“I wouldn’t…” His voice cracked a little over the words, but it was soft now. Gentle. He cleared his throat and went on hoarsely, “I never would have had this happen to you. You do know that, don’t you?”

The cancer, she realized. And something inside her seized with a pain that was almost physical. That was what this was about, not the case at all. Not really even about her. He felt guilty about the cancer.

She dropped her hand to her side. 

“You didn’t ‘let’ this happen to me, Mulder. You aren’t responsible for it.” 

“If you hadn’t followed me—if you’d kept to the assignment they first gave you—”

“I chose to follow you. I don’t regret that.” Scully looked out at the empty highway as she spoke. And she meant what she said. She did.

But—

Mulder shifted his feet, turning so that his body angled toward the motel room and away from Scully. The space separating them couldn’t have been more than half a foot, but it suddenly felt enormous. Impassable. Yet what hurt her most was the way his voice changed, became almost normal, as he said, “Let me grab a couple hours of sleep and we’ll head home. No point in wasting more time here.” 

“No, there isn’t.” She cleared her throat. “But I don’t want to wait that long.”

He paused. One hand on the doorframe now, and the other wrapped around his room key. Scully could see by the set of shoulders alone that he had no idea what she meant, so she clarified.

“Go ice your face. We’ll leave as soon as you get cleaned up and packed. You can sleep in the car, and I’ll drive.”

The whole line of his back tensed, then. Scully tensed, too. She felt as if she were waiting for a battle to start, maybe even as though she wanted one to begin.

But all he said was, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Scully echoed. 

And she wondered why it didn’t feel like more of a victory.

***

Almost five hours: that was the length of their journey home. They spent the majority of it in silence. Mulder slept, or pretended to sleep, while Scully navigated the long stretch of highway with only the radio to keep her company.

At a doughnut shop outside of Hagerstown, Maryland, she pulled over for a cup of coffee and a chance to use the restroom. Mulder was still lying in the backseat when she returned, his long legs folded at right angles to accommodate the small space, his mouth slack. He looked dead to the world, so she didn’t feel awkward about answering Pendrell’s call when her cell phone rang a few minutes later.

He just wanted to know how things were going, he said shyly. He’d woken up thinking about her.

“I’m, uh, on my way back to D.C. now, actually.” Scully looked in the rearview mirror as she spoke, relieved to find Mulder’s eyes still closed. She would have hated him to see the blush creeping across her face just then. 

_I woke up thinking about you._

Pendrell meant it innocently, of course. She was pretty sure of that. Everything about Pendrell was innocent. But it felt good, damn it, to have male attention for a change. To hear a man say he was thinking about her. To know a man cared.

They chatted about work and weekend plans for a while. Pendrell said he was having a few friends over that evening to celebrate completing his first full week of respiratory therapy. Nothing crazy, he said. He wasn’t up to that much yet. Just takeout and maybe a movie. But if she would like to join them….

Scully was noncommittal in her answer, partly because she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet his friends, but mostly because she enjoyed listening to him try to persuade her. 

“I’m not very much fun at parties these days.” She reached for her cup as she spoke, and the car began to drift alarmingly toward the center of the road. Quickly, she cradled her phone against her shoulder and corrected her steering. She even managed to do it without dumping her coffee into her lap—not an easy feat considering how distracted she felt by the conversation. 

“It’s not a party,” Pendrell was saying. “It’s just a few people hanging out. No pressure.”

He said that, but meeting his friends felt like a lot of pressure to Scully. It felt like a declaration of his intent. She took a slug of coffee to give herself time to think before answering.

“It’s a long drive today…and I have a report to finish when I get back…” 

“Sure. Yeah, of course. And if you don’t want to come tonight, maybe we could plan something tomorrow. Just us, I mean. Anything you want.” 

That sincerity was what got to her. It was impossible to refuse the man out of hand when he was always so damn accommodating.

“I didn’t say I didn’t _want_ to come,” she began. Then a movement in the rearview mirror caught her attention. 

In the back of the car, Mulder was sitting upright, awake. 

Watching her.

_Fuck._

“I’m going to have to hang up now,” she told Pendrell. “I think my cell battery is about to die.”

“Oh.” 

Pendrell sounded startled by her abrupt change in tone, maybe even a little hurt by it, so she went on. “If I can make it tonight….what time should I be there?”

“Eight o’clock?” He said it as though he needed her permission. “Or any time after that. Or, hey, any time before that, too. I just—I really—” He stopped. 

And even though Scully knew Mulder was listening, she couldn’t keep herself from asking curiously, “You what?” 

“I would really like to see you, Dana.”

An unexpected shiver of pleasure went down her spine, at that. The way his voice dropped an octave when he said her name. That little edge of yearning in his tone.

“I’d like that, too,” she said softly. “I’ll—I’ll do my best.”

She told him goodbye and tossed her phone onto the passenger seat. Behind her, Mulder was busy rocking his head from side-to-side as if trying to loosen a crick in his neck. For a long time, neither of them said anything.

Then, “Who were you talking to, Scully?”

The words were deceptively casual, but Scully knew his hackles were up. She shrugged.

“It was, um, Agent Pendrell.” She didn’t bother telling him it wasn’t a Bureau-related call. She knew she didn't have to.

“Agent _Pendrell._ ” The emphasis Mulder placed on Pendrell’s name was anything but flattering. Scully knew what he meant by it, what he was implying— 

_Agent Pendrell, huh? Is that really the best you can do?_

—and, strangely, it was the slight to Pendrell that irritated her the most, not the insult to herself. She shot Mulder a look over her shoulder.

“What about him?” she asked. 

Mulder shrugged.

“Nothing. He just seems a little young, that’s all.”

Pendrell was twenty-eight. Scully knew that because she had finally gotten around to asking him the night before. And it hadn’t struck her as so terrible at the time. A five-year age gap between educated professionals wasn’t anything at all, really. If _he_ had been the older one, nobody would have given it a second thought. 

Still—

“He _is_ young,” she admitted.

Mulder nodded. Rather complacently, Scully thought. She clenched her jaw.

“But so am I,” she added pointedly.

Their eyes met in the mirror, but only for a second. Mulder looked away first.

“Yeah,” he said. “I suppose you are.”


End file.
